Make way for the modern continuous integration and delivery platform software teams love to use: CircleCI

Siliconreview Team
2016-09-30

"Founded in 2011, CircleCI is voted one of the 2016 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area.”

One of the key indicators of the health of a company is sustained and measured growth. Founded in 2011, CircleCI is a developer-driven company that earned its place on our list by growing from 20 employees at the close of 2014 to 60 employees in the summer of 2016. Leading companies like Facebook, Kickstarter, Shyp, and Spotify rely on CircleCI to accelerate delivery of their code and enable developers to focus on creating business value fast. With headquarters in San Francisco and an award-winning culture, Silicon Valley is taking notice of this quickly rising company.

Built for Developers Velocity is critical for a software team but maintaining speed can be difficult as apps and systems grow larger and more complex. CircleCI allows developers to rapidly release code for web and mobile apps they trust by automating the build, test, and deploy process. CircleCI enables developers to detect and fix bugs before they ever reach customers.

One of the pillars of growth for CircleCI, the leader in continuous integration and continuous delivery, has been their ability to adapt in the market to see the whole picture: from mobile to web apps; open source to proprietary projects; the cloud to on premise; weekend warriors to Fortune 10’s.

DevOps is Here to Stay DevOps is tied to the rise of larger and more complex Web applications. Today, applications are decentralized and served from many machines spread across multiple datacenters from several regions. They are being built as distributed systems, which are meaningfully more complex than the single machine/single-user downloadable applications of ten years ago. Because of this scale and complexity, it is no longer possible to manually manage these applications with a handful of sysadmins. DevOps arose out of the need to automate many of the operational processes of provisioning servers, deploying applications, scaling applications, etc. DevOps is really software eating IT ops.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery is an important subset of the overarching DevOps trend that focuses on automating the deployment workflow. It’s all about taking code from a developer’s terminal, testing it and getting to customers in a highly repeatable, automated, and scalable way.

Accelerated CI/CD Adoption CircleCI addresses the main concerns of all businesses – to move fast and reduce risk. As a business, if your company is shipping something quarterly then there exists a huge amount of risk for the organization, as opposed to shipping something weekly, daily, or hourly where the risk is spread out. Additionally, CircleCI takes away the cumbersome job of infrastructure maintenance and provisioning for a CI server, which frees up engineers to focus on building better software. These main tenants are what are driving more and more enterprises to rely on CircleCI.

Built for Modern Businesses CircleCI is best positioned for success with the scalability and diversity of their platform. Teams looking for mobile, web, or on-premise CI/CD can rely on CircleCI.

Mobile App Development Nothing guarantees an app’s failure like a shipped bug and one-star review. Mobile apps live and die by their app store ratings. Mobile bugs often stay out for weeks or months, and depend on annoying external factors like app stores and user upgrades to be fixed. This is compounded further by the ease with which bugs can be introduced during the convoluted process of app submissions and mobile deployments. It is painfully easy to let some crucial misconfiguration or stupid bug make it into production, tank app store ratings, disappoint customers, and result in lost revenue. CircleCI takes away the pain and guesswork from mobile app development by continuously testing to ensure bug-free software is in users hands from the start. CircleCI provides mobile support for both iOS and Android builds.

Out-of-the-Box CI for Enterprises The use of CircleCI is exploding as it takes off in the enterprise. Previously, large enterprises had to chose between speed and security; with CircleCI Enterprise you can have both. There is a trend of more and more enterprises beginning to roll out DevOps practices, and as they do they are searching for a secure and scalable solution that removes roadblocks from developer productivity. Easily maintained, easily updated, and fully scriptable, CircleCI Enterprise is designed for high-throughput software teams. It pushes the power of build configuration, provisioning of build capacity, and parallelism settings directly to developers, freeing DevOps teams from manually managing complex configurations like plugins. CircleCI Enterprise automatically syncs with GitHub Enterprise, allowing a simple set-up even for the most complex teams. CircleCI Enterprise integrates with popular development tools and services in today’s software delivery pipeline, including Docker, without the need to manage conflicting, centralized plugins.

CircleCI Enterprise is available for deployment on most private and public cloud infrastructures. Its customers can also use the secure CircleCI OS X fleet to run their iOS builds. Organizations have the flexibility to choose between on premise or cloud-based configurations for the reliable deployment of business-critical applications. In addition to the inherent security of operating behind the firewall, CircleCI Enterprise sets a new benchmark in ease of operations and scalability for today’s most innovative and fast-paced software teams.

Continued Growth and Innovation With an eye on continued growth and developer-driven innovation, it is no wonder that over 100,000 companies and developers trust CircleCI. They could not have made it to where they are today without the support and love from software teams of all sizes around the world. The company looks ahead with optimism for adoption as well as new features and integrations that developers will love to use. Given all this, it’s unsurprising that CircleCI landed on the list of top 10 fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley.

“CircleCI runs our tests faster, cheaper, and better than any other product we’ve tried. The ease of setup and configuration is unbelievable, so it was a delight to get started with CircleCI and we were fully automated in practically less time than it just took you to read this.” – Baron Schwartz, Founder and CEO at VividCortex.

“One of the best assets we have as a company is hiring the smartest engineers we can find. Rather than provide slow or cumbersome tools, we want to provide self-service workflow for our engineers who can use them on their own time, in their own way. That’s why we have moved over to CircleCI Enterprise.” – Rob Witoff, Director at Coinbase.

“Our mission is to give every developer; the state-of-the-art automated testing and continuous integration tools.”

Key Executives

Jim Rose, CEO – Rose joined CircleCI through the acquisition of Distiller, an iOS- only continuous integration service. He was Distiller’s co-founder and CEO. Prior to Distiller, Jim was the co-founder and CEO of many companies; Copious, a social marketplace backed by Foundation Capital, Google Ventures, amongst others; Vamoose, a vertical search engine in the travel space acquired by Internet Brands; MobShop, which invented and patented the idea of group buying online in 2000, raised over $49 million in funding, and whose IP was acquired by Groupon.

Paul Biggar, Founder – Paul previously worked on the Firefox JavaScript engine at Mozilla, and is a graduate of YCombinator. He holds a PhD on static analysis of scripting languages from Trinity College in Dublin. Paul is also co-host of To Be Continuous, a podcast on all things continuous delivery.